Free or Nofollow

Looks like Google is squashing all directory owners dream. Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google’s webspan team put out a blog post about how Google will be going after people who has paid links on their sites or is it that they are going after people who are buying paid links. They basically created the whole PageRank thing and now doesn’t want people to buy their way up in PR. Just because you have a link and it’s paid for and it doesn’t have a redirect, javascript or uses “nofollow”, then it will be consider bad in Mr. G’s spider eye.

So what would directory owners do. Basically it’s got to be free listing (or paid but using “no follow”). For people to want to pay for “nofollow”, you’ve got to have good traffic. To have good taffic, it would help if you have good PageRank. It’s like the chicken or the egg. So you need to build traffic first and to do that, Google will likely want you to use their adwords/adsense rather than building your own link campaign because it seems that they are deeming that as being bad. You just have to hope that people will add you to their site and voluntarily give you a PR “vote” for your site. Does that happen often? Unless you are already a big shot, it’s probably hard to do, though not impossible.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what will happen in the coming months…or year since Google spiders seem to be crawling slow (for the deep crawl). Maybe the spiders are too tired of crawling…

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 5:10 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.